Petroleum in Perfume

Something doesn’t smell right, and not just in the Gulf. The horrifying destruction of life caused by the oil spill has everyone’s attention; what many people don’t realize is that the toxic effects of oil addiction are hitting much closer to home.

Humans have found many uses for oil, but one thing we can’t do with it is process it with our bodies to use as food or nourishment. So it’s not really a surprise, then, that synthetic chemicals made from oil byproducts don’t mesh so well with human health.

You may notice it in the funny, unpleasant feeling you get when standing in an enclosed space with somebody who is wearing too much perfume. If so, you’re not alone: adverse reactions to fragrance exposure are reported by a significant percentage of the population.

A new report by the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics illustrates why. The analysis of 17 top-selling fragrances – from Britney Spears’s Curious and Hannah Montana’s Secret Celebrity to Calvin Klein’s Eternity and Abercrombie & Fitch’s Fierce – reveals the products contain many secret petrochemicals not listed on labels and multiple toxins that can disrupt hormones or trigger allergic reactions such as asthma, headaches, wheezing, and skin rashes.

The majority of the chemicals in these products have not been assessed for safety by the cosmetics industry’s self-policing review panels.

The study comes on the heels of the recent report by the President’s Cancer Panel (see the must-read NYT piece), which sounded the alarm about the cancer risk of unregulated and unstudied chemicals used by millions of Americans in their daily lives. The panel recommended that pregnant women and couples planning to become pregnant avoid exposure to hormone-disrupting chemicals due to cancer concerns.

Many of the fragrances contained these suspect ingredients: Halle by Halle Berry, Quicksilver (for men) and Glow by JLO each contained six different chemicals with the potential to act like estrogen in the body. Synthetic estrogens are a concern because of the science linking estrogen to higher risk of breast cancer.

One wonders if these celebrities even know what’s in their products. (Send these celebs a letter.) Average consumers are certainly in the dark, thanks to a loophole in federal law that allows companies to keep fragrance ingredients secret. The companies will argue that they’ve always kept fragrances secret. But, obviously, it’s a new day.

The oil spill is an ever-present reminder that it’s time to start doing things differently than we’ve been doing them. It’s time to rethink the petrochemicals we put on our bodies, too – and to require cosmetics companies to be honest about what’s in their products and to use the safest ingredients possible.

It’s time to shift every industry away from the toxic, polluting practices of the past, to kick the oil habit once and for all, and move the entire economy toward renewable energy, clean production, and green, safe chemistry.

Dear Cover Girl: We Want Non-Toxic Products

I love to wear makeup, feel sexy and look my best—I just want to do it without rubbing cancer-causing chemicals on my body.

Does that make me a stick in the mud? Am I anti-beauty?

Cover Girl (by Procter & Gamble) seems to think so. The mega makeup brand has launched a new “Dare to be Beautiful” ad campaign, complete with $50,000 cash prize and a host of celebrities led by Drew Barrymore (see my Love Letter to Drew) who will “defend beauty’s honor” – apparently from environmentalists and feminists like me.

“Some people have tried to make beauty an ugly word. They say it’s cold, false, intimidating. We say: stand up to that! Stand up for beauty that makes you LAUGH, that makes you THINK, that makes you get out there and create some beauty of your own!” states the Cover Girl “Declaration Cloud.” (via Virginia’s beauty-schooled blog)

Instead, how about this: stand up for beauty that ISN’T TOXIC to our bodies and our souls; for beauty that is HONEST about what people really look like, and contains SAFE INGREDIENTS that won’t damage our health and our children.

Is that too much to ask of beauty?

Is it too much to ask Procter & Gamble to give it a rest with the patronizing ad campaigns, and take a look in the mirror? They might notice a few flaws that need fixing. For example:

P&G recently agreed to reformulate Herbal Essences shampoo to reduce 1,4 dioxane, a cancer-causing petrochemical. Good first step, but new product tests also found high levels of 1,4 dioxane in P&G laundry soaps Tide, Ivory Snow and Cheer.

Tests by the FDA and the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics found higher levels of lead in Cover Girl lipsticks than many other brands.

Cover Girl makeup is a leading user of quaternium 15, a known allergen and skin sensitizer that can release formaldehyde (a carcinogen) into products.

Considering the mind-boggling volume of P&G products—and their plans to add a billion new customers in the developing world—cleaning up these problems would go a long way toward reducing the planet’s toxic load.

It would go a long way toward protecting our health and defending beauty in the world. So what do you say, Cover Girl? Let’s rock it with some non-toxic products!

UPDATE: In my last blog, I wrote about the Axe craze and the lame NYT story that failed to mention concerns about hazardous chemicals in male body sprays. Well, the state of California is certainly concerned. Last month, they slapped Axe’s parent company, Unilever, with a $1.3 million fine for polluting the air with volatile organic compounds.

Why I’m a Beauty School Drop-In

By Virginia

I soap my hands up with cleanser and hover over Stephanie’s face. “Go on, get in there!” says our teacher, Miss Jenny. “You won’t hurt her.”

I press on Stephanie’s shoulders and start stroking up her neck and over her chin and cheeks. That shoulder move is key; we learned that if you touch your client’s face right off the bat, they’ll jump out of the bed. Next I start circling into the folds around Stephanie’s nose and all around her forehead until she’s covered in a thin layer of foam.

After spending four weeks with Stephanie as classmates at Beauty U, I know an assortment of random facts: She has a one-year-old nephew. She curses her oily skin. She just had two dates with a new guy, but there was no spark.

But suddenly, she stops being Stephanie (aunt, skin-obsesser, dater of spark-less dudes) and becomes just a face — an upside down series of planes and curves that I need to cover in cleanser and wipe clean with a cotton pad. It’s like when you say a word too many times in a row and suddenly can’t remember what it means.

Per Miss Jenny’s instructions, I repeat the cleansing and apply toner. When I finish, she opens her eyes and is Stephanie again. We laugh.

“Remember, we’re promoting relaxation,” says Miss Jenny. That means you want your client to totally unwind and let their guard down. But if Stephanie and I were training for any other profession, I wouldn’t have much reason to scrub the underside of her nose. And I’m learning that it’s a weird feeling to be responsible for someone else’s relaxation when you’re feeling anything but that yourself.

By the way, I know you didn’t ask, but here it is: I have a college degree. And I’ve spent the last six years as a pretty successful freelance writer. I’m telling you that because it tends to confuse people when I explain that I’m in a ten-month night school program at my local beauty school, training to become a certified esthetician. When you say “beauty school,” everyone thinks of that song in Grease and associates beauty school with something that high school “bad girls” like Rizzo and Frenchie do because they aren’t smart enough or rich enough to go to college.

Everyone is not completely wrong. A lot of my Beauty U classmates didn’t go to college and currently work service industry jobs (waitress, daycare worker, home healthcare aide). They’re hoping an esthetics or cosmetology license will be their way out and up. In the current recession, there are also a fair amount of women who are out of work or looking to bring in extra income. (By the way, Stephanie is a guidance counselor.)

I’m not a career changer, though. Like most women, especially, upper-middle class 20-something women, I’m a beauty consumer. I’m enrolled at Beauty U because I want to know exactly what I’m buying when I shell out for a facial, a haircut, or a tube of lip gloss.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, American consumers spent almost $85 billion on beauty products and services in 2008. That’s an awful lot of eye shadow and manicures. I didn’t keep receipts, but I’m guessing I chipped in at least $1,200 of that—between three or four haircuts ($120 a pop, plus products), five or six mani-pedis ($40 each, plus tip), an occasional bikini wax ($50, plus tip), and a whole mess of goodies from Sephora, Whole Foods’ Whole Body section, and my local CVS. Depending on your own personal beauty routine, I either sound high maintenance ($120 for a haircut? It’s New York City), like a slob (only two bikini waxes a year!? Sorry, they hurt like hell), or average, which is how I like to think of myself. And as a just-about-average beauty industry consumer, it made me sad to learn that while we’ve been dropping all that cash, the average salon worker earns just $8 to $15 per hour…including tips.

No, they are not sweatshop wages, and yes, there are super fancy stylists earning much more. But even high-end estheticians earn an average of $15 per hour, 40 hours per week, 52 weeks a year, which is only $31,200. Before taxes. And these are jobs that don’t offer much in the way of health insurance, retirement plans, or paid vacations.

Plus, that doesn’t take into account the human costs. Like, what happens when the cleanser I lathered all over Stephanie isn’t subjected to pre-market safety testing? Just ask Blog Posse member Stacy Malkan: Since the FDA doesn’t require beauty products to disclose all of their ingredients or prove they’re safe, most end up containing gender-bending chemicals, and carcinogens , which salon staff absorb for hours, days, and years at a time. Consumers absorb a steady stream in smaller doses; I apply at least nine products before I leave the house every day.

But what about the other hidden human costs? How does a 13-year-old feel when her mom brings her in for a bikini wax? For that matter, how do any of us feel about ever-more-constricting beauty standards that demand perfection from our every (hairless, invisible) pore? The beauty industry has successfully blurred the line between indulgence and necessity so that treatments that were once viewed as luxuries—manicures, facials, bikini waxes—are now viewed as essential. And while our self-esteem takes a hit, I’d argue that this quest for perfection degrades salon workers too. These are the people we pay to get up close and personal with the parts of our bodies that we hate the most. No wonder most of us prefer not to make eye contact.

Once I started thinking about all the ways women pay for beauty—with our wallets, self-worth, and health—I kind of couldn’t stop. I don’t think we should have to give up on our favorite beauty indulgences. Honest! I just called to confirm yet another $120 hair appointment. But I decided to go to beauty school and spend 600 hours learning to excavate pores, apply makeup, and wax bikini lines in order to get a better understanding of what we’re all really paying. Check out beautyschooledproject.com to see what I’ve uncovered so far.

Virginia is a writer by day, beauty school student by night. She owns 14 tubes of pink lip gloss and hates to brush her hair. You can visit her at her blog .

Before you Kiss for the Cause: What’s in that pink ribbon product?

It’s that time of year again, when you can’t walk five steps without finding some new opportunity to spend money for breast cancer. We can “Kiss for the Cause” with Revlon lipstick, “shower for the cure” with Philosophy Pink Ribbon Gel, dust our cheeks with “Hint of a Cure” blush by Ramy, and “Kiss Goodbye to Breast Cancer” with Avon products.

Before I rush out for a pink-ribbon makeover, I have some questions for these companies: How much money are they actually contributing to breast cancer charities, and what is the money being used for? And most importantly, are they willing to stop using chemicals linked to cancer?

The big beauty companies don’t want such questions raining on their pink parade. After all, Revlon reaps a lot of good will and positive press from its pink-branded products and efforts to raise money for breast cancer charities through the Revlon 5K Run/Walk.

Yet ironically – outrageously – many Revlon products contain chemicals linked to cancer. In fact, Revlon’s Colorsilk brand is ranked as the most toxic brand of all in the Environmental Working Group Skin Deep database, with an average toxicity score of 8.6 (with 10 being the worst).

Pink ribbon giants Avon and Estee Lauder don’t fare much better; each company makes more than 100 products with a toxicity of score of 8 or above, according to Skin Deep, and many of the products contain chemicals linked to cancer. (You can check the score of your favorite products at www.cosmeticdatabase.org.)

This is unacceptable – to say the least! As leaders in the pink-ribbon parade, Revlon, Avon and Estee Lauder have a special responsibility to be champions for women’s health by refusing to buy carcinogens from the chemical companies. As major (and influential) customers of the chemical industry, these companies have the power to shift the market away from harmful chemicals, and toward safer, non-toxic alternatives.

Instead, what we get from these companies are lots of cute pink-ribbon products, with an undisclosed portion of proceeds going to breast cancer research, almost none of which is focused on environmental causes of the disease such as cancer-causing chemicals and pollution. They want us to “hope for the cure” and get our mammograms, rather than having a serious discussion about how to prevent breast cancer, because prevention requires changes to the status quo.

For more about the not-so-cute history of the pink ribbon (which was co-opted by a beauty magazine) and Breast Cancer Awareness Month (which was started by a pharmaceutical/chemical company), see chapter 6 of my book “Not Just a Pretty Face: The Ugly Side of the Beauty Industry.”

After these stories, trust me, you’ll never look at a pink ribbon in quite the same way again. So then what? The good news is, we have a lot of power too, because we get to decide which companies we support with our money and which products we put on our bodies. We can educate ourselves and our friends about what’s really going on, and take meaningful action for change. Here are four things you can do today:

Think Before you Pink: Share this website by Breast Cancer Action with friends and encourage them to ask critical questions about pink ribbon promotions. Another great resource on this topic is the book and film No Family History, by Sabrina McCormick.

Just say No to Toxic Beauty Products: Choose products that are free of carcinogens and other harmful chemicals by using the Environmental Working Group’s Skin Deep database. Spend your money on companies with products consistently in the green zone (0-3 toxicity score).

Donate to Breast Cancer Prevention: Support The Breast Cancer Fund, the only national non-profit organization focused solely on prevention of the disease. Also check out BCF’s annual report, The State of the Evidence, a compilation of science about the environmental links to breast cancer.

Help Give the Beauty Industry a Makeover: The Campaign for Safe Cosmetics is working to pass legislation that will require cosmetics companies to eliminate chemicals suspected of causing cancer, birth defects and other health problems. Visit our website and join our email list to get involved.

Feeling Beautiful (and Safe) Inside and Out

Mia Davis, Campaign for Safe Cosmetics

People deserve to feel beautiful, inside and out. Feeling good about how you look increases confidence, thereby creating opportunities which can lead to constructive change, more energy, and even a more vibrant community. And then you feel even better, and the cycle continues.

Word!

To make yourself look/smell/feel lovely, you probably use cosmetics (creams, makeup, deodorant, etc). Most of us do- on average, American women use 10 a day, men use six a day.

But. There is an un-lovely fact that I hope that you’ll share widely: In the U.S. it is legal for the $50 billion cosmetics industry to put unlimited amounts of chemicals into personal care products, including chemicals linked to cancer and hormone disruption. In fact, cosmetics are among the least-regulated products on the market.

A woman using 10 personal care products a day exposes herself to approximately 130 unique chemicals, some of which can be potent even in super-small amounts. As the day goes on, she is probably also exposed to food pesticides, water contaminants (including hormones), air pollution, flame retardants in furniture, and BPA in plastic water containers. These exposures add up.

Some folks say, “Yeah, but so what? We’re all exposed, and we’re all fine.” I wish that were the case. We’re not all fine.

At the same time that unsafe and untested chemicals have been steadily introduced into our environment, learning and behavioral disorders, reproductive problems, and breast cancer incidence have dramatically risen. A growing body of evidence has linked the pollutants and man-made chemicals in our environment to the increasing risk of breast cancer and other diseases. The Breast Cancer Fund, a founding member of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, has a great fact sheet on some of the cosmetics ingredients of concern.

Now listen up, because this is just whack: While the rates of breast cancer rise (beyond what genetics and increased detection can account for), products marketed to women and girls contain carcinogens – including products that we slather on our faces and bodies, paint on our lips and eyelids, and wash with in the shower while our pores are wide open, on a daily basis.

Women with cancer are no different- they want to feel as well and as sexy (crazy-sexy-well, actually) as possible. Knowing this, the American Cancer Society and Personal Care Products Council (the cosmetics industry trade group) joined forces to create Look Good, Feel Better (LGFB), workshops which provide beauty tips and cosmetics for cancer patients. Sounds like a great service, right?

Well, it would be, if the products in the LGFB kits were free of carcinogens, neurotoxins and hormone disruptors, or chemicals even suspected of having these Über-serious effects. Some of the corporate donors for LGFB are companies that not only use dangerous or suspect ingredients, but actively lobby against legislation that would make cosmetics safer for those of us who do not have cancer and would like to avoid getting it, or those of us living with it and trying to look and feel better. (See my colleague Stacy Malkan’s book Not Just A Pretty Face for the scoop on the trade group’s and big companies’ opposition to safer cosmetics legislation.)

The system is clearly broken when we allow carcinogens in products given to cancer patients. And it is simply egregious that some large companies that could make safer products are not doing so, and are instead launching projects like Look Good, Feel Better, and profiting off of pink ribbons.

This really fires me up, and gets me out of bed in the morning to go work for change via the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics.

The Campaign is a grassroots coalition- and we need you. Got 2 minutes for cancer prevention and corporate accountability? Please join the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics– and help to make cosmetics safe for everyone. Have more time? Great! Contact us and tell us how you’d like to use your voice, your blog, your skills, your company to tell the public, cosmetics companies and elected officials that cancer is not inevitable, hundreds of thousands of cases can be prevented, and we will no longer allow dangerous ingredients in common consumer products like cosmetics.

Mia Davis is the National Grassroots Coordinator of the Campaign for Safe Cosmetics, and an all around Toxics Avenger who has worked on getting bisphenol A (BPA) off of store shelves throughout the country. Mia speaks and writes often for the Campaign, and works in collaboration with a diverse network of activists, citizens, health affected communities and scientists. When she’s not organizing to make the world less toxic she enjoys reading, cooking and eating, and the company of her amazing friends, family and creatures. www.safecosmetics.org, and follow Mia on Twitter @nontoxicissexy